The purpose of this blog is to report the different learning experiences in studies about an Open PhD focused on open learning. The different topics featured are: Educational Research, Educational Technology and Media, Educational Startup, Instructional Design, Open Education and learning

Monday, March 19, 2012

Open Educational Resources: Transforming the way knowledge is spread

DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS — “Do you still remember Tipp-Ex?” For Anka Mulder, secretary general of the Technical University of Delft, the bottle of white typewriter correction fluid (the U.S. brands are Wite-Out and Liquid Paper) once found on the desk of every graduate student was as evocative of the past as the taste of a madeleine was for Marcel Proust. She interrupted her remarks, considered the average age of her audience, many of whom were tweeting her comments, and asked “How many of you remember typewriters?” About half the audience held up their hands.

Ms. Mulder was speaking here at Open Education Week, an event held this month on campuses from the University of California, Irvine, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Cape Town, Leeds Metropolitan University, in England, and the National Science Library, in Beijing. At 47, Ms. Mulder can remember the days of typewriters and hardback textbooks. Yet as president of the Open Course Ware Consortium, a global group of universities devoted to expanding the amount of free, openly licensed educational material on the Internet, she is focused on the future.

For thousands of years, she said, anyone who wanted access to knowledge had to first find a teacher or an expert. After the printing press was invented, libraries and universities became repositories of knowledge. But now with the Internet, “universities do not hold the monopoly on information anymore,” Ms. Mulder said. As a result, she said, the five functions now performed by universities — teaching; providing a space for social interaction; testing students’ knowledge and offering feedback in the form of grades; cultivating a reputation as a good place to learn; and certifying what graduates know through accreditation — will inevitably change. The goal of Open Education Week was “to make the process seem less scary, she said, adding, “We want to show how you as a student or an institution or a government can benefit from these changes.”

That is also the goal of Whyopenedmatters.org, a competition begun this month by the U.S. Department of Education, Creative Commons and the Open Society Institute, which will award a prize of $25,000 for the best short video explaining the benefits of free, high-quality Open Educational Resources, or O.E.R., for students, teachers and schools. Entries will be judged by a panel that includes the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, the animator Nina Paley and the actor James Franco. In a speech announcing the competition, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said O.E.R. “can not only accelerate and enrich learning — they can also substantially reduce costs for schools, families and students.”

Beginning in 2001, when M.I.T. announced that it was going to make some of its courses available online, the movement for O.E.R. has continued to grow. In October 2003, there were 511 courses available, all from M.I.T. According to Ms. Mulder, the current total is over 21,000 — with 9,903 in languages other than English, including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, Korean and Japanese. As the movement has gathered adherents, the material available has also changed. There are still thousands of courses on the Internet that amount to little more than a camera focused on a lecturer, or even just an archive of lecture notes. But as Ms. Mulder finished her remarks here, staff members from the University of Nottingham, in England, were presenting a Web seminar on how professors could use O.E.R. to produce custom-designed textbooks.

The IE University, in Madrid, employs 14 people who work full time on producing O.E.R.

“We have programmers, designers and writers working with our professors,” said Martín Rodríguez, director of multimedia content development. “If a professor comes to us with a specific need — for example on how to calculate the cost of capital — then we go to work.”

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About this Open PhD

The purpose of this blog is to report the different learning experiences in studies about an Open PhD focused on open learning. The different topics featured are: Educational Research, Educational Technology and Media, Educational Startup, Instructional Design, Open Education and learning. The main focus of this PhD is on open learning specifically the use of the web resources and possibly other informal educational resources for self-directed and independent learning with an emphasis on web 2.0 tools for learning and personal learning networks. It's achieved by skills learning, projects, writing, teaching and research. Skills learning is done by taking different open courses and reading different articles, shared on social medias, educational project pages, curated on appropriated on social media platforms, listed on social media networks and saved on social bookmarks. The author designed many educational projects mostly focused on Open Educational Resources, Open Courseware and Open Education. As an experienced educator certified in math he is taking his educational career on the next level by developping Open Popular University www.openpu.wikidot.com and New Direction Education Services www.ndes.wikidot.com where his educational services are advertised. The author writes and pulishes educational articles on his personal blogs and social media. He also curates several articles on appropriate social media platforms.

Other artifacts used for this PhD are Educational and Professional Portfolio and Open PhD candidacy published in Peer-to-Peer University and Wikiversity . The PhD is by research and publication. The articles on Open learning will be used for the publication of a book on open learning. The next phase will be the developement of a thesis. Meanwile and/or after the publication of the thesis the blog will publish academic research on self-directed learning, comment on this research, publish litterature reviews and original research, essays, original research focused mostly on Action Research. It is the intention of the author to work with supervisors, peers, educators, interested organizations in this innovative PhD to get the most widely recognition. The author is interested in having is work validated or credited by a respected educational institution believing in innovative ways of learning

About Me

Yves Simon is an experienced educator certified in Math, self-directed and lifelong learner interested in various ways of learning and media and web technology resources. His educational background is in Civil Engineering, Math, Physics, Science, languages, Educational Administration, Curriculum and Instruction and open learning. He provides face-to-face and online tutoring and teaching services.He also provides other services such as translation in French and English, Math content development and writing and article writing. Visit his website New Direction Education Services at www.ndes.wikidot.com to contact him about services provided. He is particular engaged in the dissemination of web educational resources and tools for learning.

Educational content curation

Open Popular university brings to the world courses from the most respected universities around the world at the graduate and undergraduate level in the fields of Engineering, Math, Science, Education, Human Sciences, etc, In the future Open Popular university will offer online courses directly from this site. For support, collaboration, contact, donation, etc visit the site at www. openpu.wikidot.com. Your support, collaboration and donations will help this site running. Open Popular University is looking for volunteers to teach online courses and needs funds for paid staff to develop the site, a physical location and materials to fulfill its mission to help thousands of learners, self-learners and educators worldwide. The ambition is to bring the world open courses in this site, demystify the fact that knowledge is the privilege of a few and can only be learned in formal institutions.

Math course by Yves Simon

This is a free math course offered by Yves Simon, certified and experienced math educator. For tutoring online and face-to-face, teaching online and face-to-face in the following subjects: Math, ESL, French and Spanish visit NewDirection Education Services at www.ndes.wikidot.com Calculus course